Vachon Imagined

With every article, every passing advertisement, every opinion offered as certainty, another tether is cast around what love is supposed to be and what it is not. Love is dissected as though it were a specimen on a table, something that can be understood by taking it apart into manageable pieces. We become scientists of ourselves, sorting through the discarded fragments of our lives like forgotten relics, searching for what is useful, what is acceptable, and what should be thrown away.

But those who simply love are engaged in a different kind of expedition.

It is a journey of the soul.

Perhaps it does not look so different from the scientist or the person carefully sifting through old memories, judgments, and disappointments. Both appear to be searching. Yet one searches for conclusions while the other discovers there is nothing to conclude. One asks what belongs and what does not. The other realizes that everything already belongs.

Most of what we call love is merely the mind sorting through experience. It decides what feels good and what feels bad, what deserves acceptance and what deserves rejection. It measures. It compares. It protects itself.

The soul does none of these things.

The soul loves whatever appears. It does not ask whether something is beautiful or broken, noble or shameful, convenient or unbearable. It receives life before judgment has the chance to divide it.

Anything else is simply sorting through what already exists.

Love itself cannot be separated into parts because it was never made of parts. It cannot move toward completeness because it is already whole. It cannot arrive anywhere because it is already everything.

This becomes painfully visible in the moments we judge most harshly.

It is the person who leaves because they no longer possess the capacity to give what another needs. It is the mother who walks away from the children she cannot bear to raise. These moments are heartbreaking, confusing, even devastating. They are not examples of love’s absence. They are expressions of the limits of the human condition.

The soul does not celebrate these moments, nor does it condemn them. It simply sees them as they are.

Everything belongs to life.

Everything belongs to love.

Not because every action is admirable, but because nothing exists outside the great unfolding of existence itself.

Those who live from the soul know this as naturally as they know the rhythm of their own breathing. They recognize that the same life moving through joy also moves through grief, through courage and fear, through tenderness and failure. The current never ceases because one moment is beautiful and another is not.

Love, in its deepest sense, is not selective.

It is the quiet recognition that nothing has ever stood outside the life that carries us all.